Latest / Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes / 6 Books That Changed How We Run Our Businesses

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6 Books That Changed How We Run Our Businesses · Home Service Millionaire with Mike Andes

0:00
I was very frustrated with the way that the company was going and the leadership.
0:04
Just being very blunt in terms of like either A, these changes have to occur and we need to see these gaps and fill them.
0:11
Or I will be letting you all go and I will be finding your replacements.
0:15
But I'd say it's probably worked out 50% of the time.
0:17
The conversation didn't change anything for the long term.
0:19
It only changed things for a week or a month and then ultimately they had to be removed.
0:23
Okay, great.
0:23
We've got to 150, 200 locations.
0:25
That's not 1,000, then that's the goal.
0:28
And there's a reason why we're not 1,000.
0:30
We have a skill gap.
0:31
We had 27 formal offers.
0:32
We took eight people, like very serious, down to the end.
0:36
We took three companies through due diligence at the same time.
0:38
It's okay for me to want more.
0:39
It's okay for me to want to accomplish more and tap into this competitive side of me.
0:45
And I need to channel it.
0:47
I need to put guards on it.
0:49
A lot of people think I'm really great at my craft.
0:51
Why isn't my business growing?
0:53
I'm the best at doing stonework.
0:55
I'm the best at doing this thing.
0:56
It's because nobody has the faintest idea who you are.
0:58
Hey, everyone.
0:59
Welcome back.
1:00
So, Mike, you're at...
1:02
I keep wanting to call it GIE.
1:04
Expo.
1:04
Equip Expo.
1:05
Equip Expo these days.
1:06
It's been a while since I've been.
1:09
Just kept running inside, took off my shoes, literally still have a stain from scarfing down dinner on my shirt.
1:15
So here we are in the basement of my Airbnb.
1:17
You had to catch the pod.
1:19
So it's a Wednesday.
1:20
Are you guys doing set up today or has the show started?
1:23
Show started.
1:24
And what's interesting is that when you're on the West Wing, it actually starts at 9 a.m. on Wednesday.
1:28
So that's where we're at.
1:29
Yeah.
1:29
Yeah.
1:30
It's always been at 12 for the main event.
1:32
I thought that was in my mind.
1:33
And then Lynn's like, I don't think so.
1:35
I think we're at nine o'clock.
1:36
So.
1:37
So one portion starts first and then the next side opens up later.
1:41
Opens up.
1:42
Yep.
1:42
Three hours later.
1:43
Interesting.
1:44
Wow.
1:44
Okay.
1:45
I didn't know that.
1:45
What's your take?
1:46
It's been a long day.
1:46
A lot of talking.
1:47
A lot of talking.
1:48
That's my takeaway.
1:49
Yeah.
1:49
This morning I started at 630 with a right mowers prayer breakfast thing and then right to the expo and talk, talk.
1:58
Standing in the booth the whole day talking.
1:59
Oh, yeah.
2:00
And, of course, we don't have carpet because we do more or less at Augusta.
2:04
And so no carpet.
2:06
It was great.
2:07
You didn't have to pay the union to put down your strip of carpet?
2:10
No, I am not paying $500 to put in such a scam.
2:14
It's so true.
2:16
Yes, yes.
2:17
Well, we weren't as smart as you.
2:18
We always put down the carpet.
2:19
So does it seem busy?
2:21
What's it like?
2:22
What's it like?
2:23
Um, I'd say it's busier than the years I was, I was there four years ago.
2:27
Okay.
2:28
Okay.
2:28
So you haven't been that often frequently then?
2:30
Oh, okay.
2:31
Yeah.
2:31
Like it's been a long time.
2:32
Like it's, I had to think back cause I was like, okay, that was before my North Carolina challenge before I wrote my books is before a lot of our events.
2:38
So like, it's been definitely overwhelming the amount of people that have talked and like, they just, I wanted to chat and things, uh, cause very different than was four years ago.
2:49
Yeah.
2:49
It's like 10, 10 times more I would say.
2:51
Okay.
2:53
Okay.
2:53
Interesting.
2:55
I've had multiple people text me to ask if I'm there.
2:59
I haven't been there forever, but checking to see if I was there.
3:02
But it got me talking to Riley.
3:03
It's like, if you go next year, Riley, which he's like, he said, I think it's about time.
3:08
Um, then, uh, I might, I might actually make it, I might show up next year and have to check it out and see what, what it's like these days.
3:15
No carpet, no carpet.
3:16
I'll just tell Riley, low budget.
3:19
Every chat needs to have no carpet.
3:22
No carpet.
3:24
All right.
3:24
I'll pass that wisdom on to him.
3:27
All right.
3:27
So this week, what we've decided to talk about is we've each picked three books that we found to be highly valuable and impactful that we actually applied in our life.
3:40
And so we each went back and thought about what would three, those three books be.
3:44
We're going to take turns chatting about them and asking each other questions.
3:48
So with that, Mike, what's your number one?
3:51
Yeah.
3:51
So this one, I think you're all yours are gonna be older.
3:54
So I, I try to not, I try to pull some of my old, so I actually, I tried to do it.
3:58
I went through 450, the books that I've looked through.
4:01
I came with 11, so I'm gonna take my top three, but I have eight in reserves in the chamber.
4:06
That was the problem.
4:07
That's the same problem I had.
4:08
It was so hard to pick.
4:09
Yeah, so I was like, I was kind of like, okay, these will be the eight.
4:11
If Jonathan picks any of my three, I can switch it up.
4:14
So, uh, the first, the first one is from Sam Walton.
4:18
It's called made in America.
4:19
It's really just the story of Walmart getting started.
4:23
I know people don't necessarily like Walmart all the time, but, uh,
4:27
I learned a lot from that book.
4:30
I found that I have, from a book perspective, I have most enjoyed the ones where there's just a story being told about someone's life, and then I get to derive kind of the learnings.
4:38
I don't know if that's like the skeptic in my mind where it's like,
4:43
instead of telling me what I need to do, just tell me what happened, and I will derive lessons for that.
4:49
Perhaps that might be flawed.
4:52
But he was just a genius merchandiser.
4:54
The ability to be able to put a retail store, lay it out correctly, incentivize it.
5:01
Really just studying the consumer.
5:03
I think that was some of the things that I took away from is really, truly understanding who your customer is, what their pain is, and what makes you unique compared to every other of your competitors.
5:14
Another thing that really stood out about Walmart is the way that they do their compensation with their general managers.
5:20
And it's actually a big reason why we started the 3F program at Augusta.
5:23
So it's franchise fee forgiveness.
5:24
It's where general managers that spend a certain amount of time
5:28
and go through the certain stages, they can become an owner for no extra cost.
5:32
So they basically save $35,000.
5:33
They don't have to pay the initial franchise fee.
5:36
And so we actually just yesterday had another owner out in Utah that joined.
5:40
He's been a GM for years and he went to the program.
5:43
And so it's actually another reason why, because I read this book about four times.
5:49
And the more recent time that I read it is actually when we started the give back program, which is the initial fee for owners goes back to them and we pay them back at the end of their term.
6:00
So basically if you stay inside of Augusta for 10 years, you get the money back.
6:03
And there was a couple of –
6:04
Yeah, there's a couple instances where Sam Walton talks about how they handled the managers of the stores and how important it was that they be invested inside the store and take ownership of that store.
6:18
A lot of Truett Cathy's philosophy or even at Chick-fil-A has been around this.
6:23
and so uh which is another book which i did not get on this list but uh it really inspired me to both those programs and those are those are two kind of like fundamentally different things about augusta and i know you'd ask like hey be specific like what exactly has changed and so for me i can draw back to the two times that we made these two big changes was after i read this book uh and it was just highlighting the importance of the operator and the manager in the store
6:49
And I've said this for years when it comes to like, locations of gusts or any like, and even you've mentioned the importance of like, an operations killer, like a great operations manager, like a great operator in a lousy market will still crash.
7:03
And a lousy manager, you know, operations manager in a great market will do pathetically.
7:11
And within 60, 90 days, it'll deteriorate a good location.
7:14
And so a lot of those philosophies tied back to that book.
7:19
One of the things though, that I have not yet done is I have not got a private jet.
7:22
And Sam Walton has got lots of private jets for Walmart in the name of frugality.
7:29
So somehow one day I'll engineer a way of convincing my board somehow that getting a fleet of private jets is going to make me somehow more frugal.
7:41
I think if I remember correctly, how they one of the ways they justified that and it might even relate to some of your takeaways around.
7:49
I kind of heard a few of your examples as when you find a great GM or you have great people, how do you like lock them down, get them invested in the organization, get them to stay, things like that.
7:59
Well, one of the things, if I remember correctly, was he wanted to get his team home by night for dinner.
8:05
And that's one of the ways they justified the private jet.
8:08
I hear that as a similar concept to what you just said.
8:10
It's like, how do we make this a great environment for people?
8:13
How do we get them bought in?
8:14
How do we keep them here?
8:16
That could have been one of the ways he justified it.
8:18
Yeah, the one way that I like to justify private jets, now that we're on this topic, this is great.
8:22
This is a great episode.
8:24
So he would fly his private jet, or he's probably a prop plane because he was flying.
8:31
So he would fly around the city centers, and he would look for the suburbs, and he would look for directionally where he thought the city was going to move.
8:39
And this is a long time ago.
8:41
So like it wasn't necessarily you're not going to go into AI and see like where's the population growth going.
8:45
But he would look for where there are major highways and the direction they're moving and where new buildings are starting to pop up.
8:53
And he would just fly around and see these generators.
8:55
And that's where Walmart positions itself is usually in the suburbs and a little further out than where their growth is at.
9:02
And this is actually another principle I took with in the book, and that's for Augusta owners, because we've seen our best locations are generally in those areas where there's new money moving.
9:11
There's not necessarily as much established competitors, but there's a there's a lot of new competitors and there's a lot of new growth in terms of population.
9:21
But usually on the suburbs, we don't we don't dominate in like urban areas.
9:25
very established markets.
9:27
It's around the suburbs.
9:29
And so again, another reason to get a private jet.
9:32
We will soon have an episode where Jonathan goes out and gets his private jet.
9:35
Now that we can also say he did not get his 15th car after last week's episode, we now have a budget to put towards said private jet.
9:44
This is a cheap private jet I'm buying, apparently, then.
9:46
If I have a budget, it's a down payment.
9:49
And now every now every chat that comes to Equip Expo next year can fly in the private jet, have no carpet on the floor.
9:55
There we go.
9:56
Yes.
9:56
Yes.
9:57
So speaking of that, last week, you know, at the end, we were talking about I asked you the question, like if you had unlimited money out in the future, what lifestyle would you live?
10:07
And you played the game of I don't know.
10:09
I don't really think of it.
10:09
I just want to work.
10:11
But I hear you talking about a private jet quite a bit here.
10:13
Like, okay, so I don't know if you were fully honest last week.
10:16
I think this private jet is in your mind.
10:19
It is in my mind.
10:20
I flew on a private jet one time.
10:22
Okay.
10:23
You probably don't know who this is.
10:25
His name is Meet Kevin.
10:26
He's a YouTuber.
10:26
Oh, yeah, I know who he is.
10:27
Yes.
10:28
Do you watch some of his stuff?
10:30
I don't know.
10:30
Do you watch any of his stuff?
10:31
Way back.
10:31
Way back.
10:32
Yeah.
10:32
Back in 2020.
10:33
I don't know what he does now.
10:34
He's doing... Was it only 2020?
10:36
Okay.
10:36
Well, he's like... That's when he blew up.
10:37
But before that was real estate.
10:39
Yeah.
10:39
I knew him from the real estate stuff.
10:41
Yeah.
10:42
I got in his private jet and we went and looked at some real estate on Colorado one time.
10:46
That was fun.
10:47
I did realize it was mostly hype, the private jet thing.
10:50
I was like, you know...
10:51
The best part about this is not having to go through security and just driving straight onto the tarmac and getting on the plane.
10:57
That was great.
10:58
But the actual private jet experience, I was like, it looks like the window and my view looks exactly the same.
11:05
So outside of the takeoff, like,
11:08
The, what's it called?
11:10
The angle of attack or whatever.
11:11
The takeoff angle.
11:13
That and the fact that you can drive on the Tomrock.
11:15
It would be a high ticket.
11:17
I don't know if I can make sense of it.
11:19
I think I'm going to have to, you know, I'll be at JP's level, which is like lots of cars before I get a private jet.
11:25
It's hard to justify.
11:26
It's so expensive.
11:28
You know, now that you're in Dallas, you can go to the DFW airport with your TSA clear, whatever your thing is.
11:35
You can valet your car right in front of the terminal, walk straight in.
11:39
I mean, I I leave my house.
11:42
an hour and 20 or hour and 30 minutes before my flight.
11:45
And I'm on my flight out of DFW every time I've never missed a flight.
11:49
Let's go.
11:49
So it's cool to drive up to the jet, but it really actually only probably saves like 30 minutes.
11:56
Like real, you know, so cause Dallas is a fantastic airport.
12:00
Yeah.
12:00
Greg Levecchia from Bloom, the founder.
12:03
Okay.
12:04
He says he likes to spend as much money as possible on private jets because it makes him want it.
12:08
It forces him to think bigger and make more money.
12:11
Yeah, exactly.
12:11
I've heard people say that before.
12:15
Two things I thought of when you were talking.
12:18
So since you like these kind of books, have you ever read Shoe Dogs?
12:21
Yes.
12:21
Yes.
12:21
Did you like that book?
12:25
I really like that book.
12:26
Yes.
12:26
And what about Hard Thing About Hard Things?
12:29
I have not heard of that book.
12:30
Okay, that's a great book.
12:31
I think you might like it.
12:32
I have heard of it.
12:32
I can't recall, like, the messaging of it.
12:34
Ben Horowitz of Horowitz.
12:35
Okay.
12:36
And it's all orange.
12:37
It's orange.
12:38
Yeah.
12:38
The front cover.
12:39
Okay, so I've read it.
12:40
I don't recall the storyline.
12:42
Those two, for me, when I think about books where you're listening to the founder, have always stuck with me for whatever reason.
12:50
There's a lot of them.
12:51
There's several I had listed here, like Bad Blood, for example, about Theranos, which is now a big thing because the movie came out.
12:58
I heard it.
12:59
I heard there's a new thing.
12:59
Yeah, there's a new thing.
13:02
But that's a good one.
13:03
And then the one about Uber, Super Pumped, another story of a business.
13:08
There's another one about a story of Netflix from the founder.
13:10
I love those books.
13:11
I just love the story because you see it's just...
13:15
whenever there's a a book like alex writes obviously uh what's it called fiction non-fiction oh yeah yeah intangible like do these things yeah there's definitely a use case for that i think there's such an also a super cool use case just to hear someone's story and for you to be able to connect the dots and then when every time you read it it feels like a different book because you just start pulling different little things they're like oh that's useful for me like shoot night or uh
13:40
What's it called?
13:41
Shoe dogs.
13:42
Shoe dogs.
13:42
Yeah.
13:44
Every time I read that, it's different because I'm at a different size of business, and I'm kind of like, it is most applicable to me at a certain part of the book.
13:52
So it's always been interesting.
13:53
That makes a lot of sense.
13:54
I took the more tactical approach.
13:56
Most of my books have been tactical that I've read over the years.
13:58
Yeah.
14:00
i'm more that way too well i'm usually that more like but if someone really recommends i read it it's one of those times like i don't read fiction but like it's like i just gotta i gotta finish the book i still remember on uh super pumped which is uber's book from travis kalanick i could not put it down i was in chicago on a layover got canceled and i read the whole book until like 3 or 4 a.m oh interesting
14:23
All right.
14:23
Kate, what's your first one?
14:24
So mine is, because I had a whole list, I decided to go with one that worked perfectly with last week's episode.
14:31
And so I just made a list of, okay, you're thinking about this.
14:34
I just made a list of the books.
14:36
I noted them that just came to mind.
14:39
That's how I approached it.
14:42
And then I went and pulled the books out and I flipped through them trying to remember like why.
14:46
Because you're right.
14:47
My books are all old.
14:48
Yeah.
14:49
Because that was the time.
14:51
They all represent a time where I'm really trying to figure stuff out.
14:53
So most of these probably are all 20-year-old books, I'm guessing.
14:57
Because I was really trying to figure it out.
14:59
So...
15:02
So my book is a Dan Kennedy book.
15:05
I could have had several Dan Kennedy books, but I went with one.
15:08
And it's No BS Time Management.
15:10
And it plays to last week's.
15:12
And so I would have probably been in my late 20s when I read this book.
15:18
And...
15:20
I would have already kind of been thinking this way, but I wouldn't have been necessarily fully living it.
15:24
I was trying to figure things out.
15:25
It's like where most of us are.
15:26
You've gathered tidbits and ideas from all over.
15:30
But then my recollection again, 20 something years ago, 20 years ago, um,
15:36
I just remember this book was just like a, yes, this is truth.
15:40
This makes all sense.
15:41
Now it's a little hardcore, a little more hardcore than maybe I wanted to be, but this made sense.
15:46
And so the entirety of the book is all about how do you get things done in a massive way compared to everybody else.
15:54
I'm sure that's not how he said, well, that he would say things like that, but that's the gist of the idea.
15:59
So I noted some takeaways from the book.
16:02
One of them was, and some of these, you know, these, lots of people have, you know,
16:07
read books like this and they regurgitate this.
16:10
You hear these ideas all over.
16:12
Dan Kennedy has got to be one of the most influential people.
16:15
When I read, when I listen to Alex Hormosey, I'm not saying, there's no negative here.
16:19
Same when you listen to me.
16:20
I'm like, there's no way I'm not speaking things that I learned from Dan.
16:24
When I listen to Alex, I'm like, Dan, Dan, Dan, that's Gary Halbert.
16:28
That's, you know, whoever.
16:30
Because we were all, this is how we all grow.
16:32
And so a couple from Dan,
16:36
was this idea of what your time worth, like really simple.
16:38
Like what is your time?
16:39
How much is an hour of your time worth?
16:44
And you use that to make decisions, like in terms of where you're going to spend your time, what you're going to let interrupt your time, who you're going to let interrupt your time, the value of this project versus that project.
16:56
The idea that you can overspend in other areas of your life, like essentially waste money because it protects your time.
17:05
The idea that why would you be doing work around your house that you could hire somebody for 25 bucks an hour to do it when your time's worth hundreds of dollars or thousands an hour, depending on where you're at in business.
17:18
Last time I recall, you still clean your cars though.
17:20
I do not, I never have.
17:21
Oh, you did, I thought last week you said you did.
17:24
Okay, nevermind.
17:26
I only drive my cars.
17:29
I don't even do my inspection stickers.
17:31
Okay.
17:32
All right.
17:33
You're making me feel better.
17:34
Because, like, last week, I was under the assumption for some reason you wash your cars.
17:37
Okay.
17:37
All right.
17:38
Because I alluded to the problem of my car.
17:41
Like, if a car breaks down, I have a tow truck.
17:43
Come pick it up and haul it away.
17:44
I don't even drive.
17:45
I don't even.
17:45
Like, if it needs work.
17:47
I don't even drive it there most of the time.
17:50
So I am practicing what I preach.
17:52
No, I love cars, but I hate everything about cars except driving them.
17:56
I hate that they break.
17:58
I hate that they have to be cleaned.
17:59
I don't even want to drive them to a car show and show them to other people.
18:02
I just want to drive them for me and put them back in my garage.
18:06
No way do I clean cars.
18:07
Guys love cleaning their cars.
18:08
Yeah.
18:11
No, no, I hate it.
18:13
Okay.
18:13
Anyway.
18:14
So, but you're identifying these time waster kinds of things.
18:18
Two other things that I took, like flipping back through the book, this idea of time vampires.
18:23
He uses that word time vampires.
18:24
What is it?
18:25
And I think this is such a great exercise.
18:27
What is it in your life that's sucking up your time, that's stealing your time?
18:31
It's the idea that you're in an office environment.
18:33
What?
18:34
and somebody comes into your office, if you've ever heard that idea, they bring their monkey in with them and they leave their monkey with you, so they bring their problem to you.
18:41
Or that people are just in and out of your office all the time.
18:45
And so there's a lot of ways.
18:46
I'll give you some ideas to apply some of these things.
18:49
But what are all those things?
18:50
You're on Facebook, you're on Instagram.
18:52
They're all these little time vampires where you don't realize that that was three hours of your day like that that's gone.
18:59
So where are you, where could you be paying other people to do more for you so that you spend more time on the business or you spend more time not on anything where you're literally decompressing so that you can be on and have energy when you are working on the business or when you're with your family?
19:15
And then the time vampire thing, what are all the little leaks inside your business?
19:19
And then the other, another one would be, it's similar to time vampires.
19:23
How do you protect access to you?
19:26
And so one of the things I learned way back, and I, this was a direct, I had directly applied this after reading Dan's book.
19:34
So I was back in those days, I was in a cleaning company and we had an office and, yeah.
19:43
Whenever I go to the office, I was just way less productive.
19:46
Like people want to talk, we'd go to lunch.
19:48
Everybody wants to have a problem.
19:50
When I was into the office, nobody wants to talk.
19:52
We don't have problems.
19:53
Everything just works.
19:55
And so I loved going to the office because I really liked everybody I worked with, but it was highly unproductive.
20:01
And so I and I had two little boys at home.
20:03
So I rented a little warehouse office three miles from my house.
20:09
And that is where CityTurf got started.
20:11
So for those that know that CityTurf forever worked out of these storage units and these little bitty offices that we cut the holes in the wall and made them into a bigger office over time, for anybody that knows that story, the whole way that happened is because I was applying this idea that I wanna go work in an office by myself where nobody can ask me questions.
20:31
And we have scheduled- We have cages, boys.
20:33
I have to be focused, exactly.
20:35
Jonathan, it's a new area, you can't do that anymore.
20:39
no windows no ac everyone just locked in in the uh in the uh cut a hole in the no rolled up the door the back of the storage unit rolled up the back door built a wall put in a window unit that's how we solved the problem and i work right there
20:54
That's literally how city turf ended up there, but it worked because, you know, you still have to pay attention to your, your team, but I could do it on a schedule.
21:03
And so one of the most, uh, most important books I read, I'll give you a couple of last things.
21:09
Like you hear, heard all that.
21:10
Well, how do you apply it?
21:11
Okay.
21:11
So ways you apply it, you trust your team more and give them more authority.
21:15
You have more check-in meetings.
21:16
You give them budgets that start out really small so they don't have to ask you, hey, can we spend 25 bucks on this?
21:21
Can we spend 50 on that?
21:22
So you take more of an approach of giving them some leash, letting them succeed or fail, then coaching instead of micromanaging everything.
21:31
You set meetings.
21:33
So I'm going to meet with you every Tuesday and Friday at 11 a.m.,
21:37
You bring your stuff, your questions.
21:39
If you have something that's critical before a Tuesday, Friday meeting, of course we can talk about it.
21:43
But everything that you can, we save it till that time.
21:46
I save all my stuff and we talk then.
21:49
And then you've probably heard you don't necessarily need to do this, but it's an example.
21:56
How can you find focus time?
21:58
For me, I was so concerned about I was working in office environments and I had two little boys.
22:05
So for me, I found my focus time from when Tiffany went to bed at around 11.
22:10
9.30, 10 o'clock at night till 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning.
22:13
And I could knock out five hours of work right there.
22:16
And so you just have to find what works for you.
22:19
Those are the ways that I applied a few of those principles.
22:22
Yeah, I think the challenging part on that front for me is to like, you feel guilty.
22:27
There's a period of time where you feel guilty because you're not being as accessible to people.
22:33
And I think it served me really well, probably up to like 20 employees, to be super involved in like onboarding.
22:39
every person out for lunch.
22:41
I would make videos for every single person's birthday and their work anniversary.
22:45
And those are things almost to pride in because you usually hear that one person that does that all the time.
22:51
And they're able to do it to a big company.
22:53
And then you start realizing that you have no more time in your day because you're stuck doing all these things.
22:58
And then
22:59
about 30, 40 employees, okay, I have to give this identity up.
23:03
But you still feel bad.
23:04
Like you feel like, oh, I should be there.
23:06
I should be available.
23:07
I should be talking to them more often.
23:09
And so the thing that I kind of synthesize now is like, is it scalable communication?
23:13
Like, is it if I make a video for the whole team that's scalable, it's something that everyone can watch on their own time.
23:19
I'm not interrupting their schedule.
23:21
And I don't have to talk to 50 different people or 100 different people asyncly, differently, 100 different times.
23:28
That's how I kind of try to rationalize.
23:30
But it was tough for me.
23:32
Yeah, I had a similar experience in it, about the same number.
23:35
So many things just start – they stop happening.
23:39
One of the things that I've thought about – because I have a whole list of things I'd do differently if I did it again.
23:43
And one of the ideas I had – Wait, you have a whole list of things you would do differently if what?
23:48
Yeah.
23:48
You started the businesses?
23:49
I did like another service, Autopilot, started a new company that got bigger.
23:53
Got it.
23:53
Things I learned.
23:54
Like they were in general, like almost like leadership or like organizational.
23:57
Yeah, they were reflections.
23:59
I made a reflections list years ago after I was gone from the business.
24:04
And I had him during my sabbatical.
24:05
I was like, if I could do it all over again, these are the things I would do different.
24:09
And some of them.
24:10
That didn't drag you back in mentally?
24:12
No, no.
24:13
Really?
24:14
Wow.
24:14
That would pull me right back into it.
24:17
No, the thing my brain kept cycling on back then was what I'm going to do next whenever I start working again.
24:24
And I just kept thinking about it all the time because there were so many opportunities.
24:28
And I think that was just one of the...
24:31
little exercises that I found enjoyable.
24:34
It's like, I'm just gonna do a brain dump here.
24:36
They'll get some of this off my mind.
24:37
What did I learn?
24:38
It was just a reflecting thing.
24:39
And some of them live in conflict too.
24:41
Some like being very focused and locking down your time, which I did quite a bit, lives in conflict too.
24:49
I would have actually been even more present in customer service.
24:53
I would have spent more time.
24:55
For one year, I moved out of my office, which John and Brian didn't like.
24:58
They did this.
24:59
I moved out of my office, and I sat with sales and training at Service Autopilot in the middle of the room with them.
25:06
And so that kind of lives in conflict with what I just talked about.
25:09
But I think you go in seasons.
25:12
You figure out what the thing is.
25:14
What started all this is one of the thoughts that I had, if I could do it all over again—
25:19
I would have had lunch brought in multiple times a week and had lunch with small groups of the team and just move through the company that way.
25:27
We did some of that, but I would have done way more of it.
25:31
So anyway, the more individual one off.
25:34
You still do some of the individual conversations, but that would give you the ability to stick when you have 100 to 200 people in a company.
25:42
It gives you more opportunity to meet with more of those people because you can meet with like five people at one time of different departments and things like that.
25:52
The hard part for me whenever I started doing that sort of thing is like, whenever someone mentions or I hear them say something about working at the company, it's almost always that they go to the individual communication they've had with myself or the leader.
26:05
And I'm like, am I doing enough of that?
26:08
And that's the part that always gets me, because I have a decent memory for people's life events.
26:13
And so I'm able to bring it up from a month ago.
26:16
They mentioned one time, I was like, hey, how'd that go?
26:18
But I feel like sometimes I'm losing that, especially with the owners of Augusta.
26:22
Now there's over 150 of them, the owners, and I feel horrible.
26:27
But it's also like if I individually was spending time with each person, I would have zero.
26:31
time in my day to actually move the needle and um so there was like around 100 i was just like i have to mentally take not take pride it was really it's a pride thing for me of like genuinely caring and then being able to show that uh but being like hey i have to separate myself from that because it was taking too much of my time trying to into to be too individual with each person it's the bummer about it getting bigger yeah it just i remember
26:58
It was sometime after we'd done our business deal and I was at this place in out on Katy Trail in Dallas.
27:04
Doesn't really matter, but we're sitting outside.
27:06
It's a nice day.
27:07
And I don't remember who I was with, but there were a bunch of they have these big picnic tables all over outside.
27:13
And there are a bunch of people.
27:15
all sitting there at these different tables, all with their laptops.
27:18
And I was just thinking that was the best time of service autopilot.
27:22
It's been the best time of every business when the team is about 10 to 20 people and you're just all in the battle together.
27:30
And so I was picturing these people all being a company, all there together.
27:35
12 people could fit around a big giant picnic table that like those are the fun times because, you know, everybody personally, you deal with everybody.
27:41
But once it gets big, it's impossible.
27:43
It's just really impossible.
27:44
We were on Katie Trail last weekend.
27:46
Oh, you were?
27:47
Katie Trail's?
27:47
Yeah.
27:48
Where you just walk it.
27:48
I see him just walk it.
27:49
Yeah.
27:50
Yeah, it's great.
27:50
Yeah.
27:51
We go down there for 100 times.
27:52
All right, yours.
27:52
Book number two?
27:53
All right.
27:54
So this one is like, I have to put it on here.
27:56
It's one of those ones where I've talked about it a lot.
27:58
It's just the best leadership book I've ever read in my life because it's very tactical.
28:04
So quite the opposite of the story.
28:07
And that's Leadership Strategy and Tactics from Jocko Willink.
28:10
So I mentioned a few times before in the past,
28:13
And I think it is probably the most tangible book when it comes to leadership I've ever read in my life.
28:20
I've read it many, many times.
28:21
It's a handbook, so it's very short.
28:22
You can read it in about an hour and a half to two hours, or listen to it, I should say.
28:25
That's how I do it.
28:27
Uh, this one is a little bit special for us because we went to Jocko's event, the muster two years ago.
28:34
Yeah.
28:35
Two years ago, almost to the day mercy, uh, two years ago.
28:40
And I took my leadership team from Augusta and it was after that event.
28:45
We had like a very, very hard talk for a few hours.
28:48
Uh, we went to a little barbecue spot for Roy Hutchinson's out there.
28:52
Uh, it goes in Dallas and yeah.
28:56
had some really good conversation, and I was very frustrated with the way that the company was going and the leadership.
29:03
I felt like a sense of complacency was happening, mostly because of the notoriety or the successes that were happening were, in my opinion, lulling the team to sleep.
29:14
So there was some really, really hard conversations we had after Jocko's muster.
29:21
I had leading up to that was reading this book a lot to get into the mindset of how he was thinking so that after that training that we all had in person at the muster, I could kind of drop the bomb.
29:34
And so it was quite the bomb, but it was like a very pivotal moment to I felt like.
29:40
level up the leadership to what we needed to get to the next level.
29:44
And just being very blunt in terms of either A, these changes have to occur, and we need to see these gaps and fill them, or I will be letting you all go, and I will be finding your replacements.
29:57
And them being open to the fact that if you need to find someone else that
30:01
gets us to the next level, we're willing to have someone come above us and higher above us.
30:06
And so it was just a great conversation and I think a lot of it was fortunately handled well because of this book.
30:13
So I actually give a lot of credit to this book for me handling those conversations correctly, knowing too that they were gonna be coming out of an event with these thoughts so I could kind of
30:22
funnel them appropriately.
30:24
But those three leaders are still with us and have made the pivot, have been able to upgrade their skillset.
30:30
So, because there's always these adjustments in the business where it's either like, hey, do I shed the current team and hire?
30:36
And a lot of times when you...
30:38
take a specifically a leadership role or an executive role and you hire above them usually doesn't end super well.
30:44
But it's what's required for the business to keep growing when you have more skills required.
30:49
And so for them to be able to all step up and just like have this huge
30:53
you know, six to 12 months of them and just really leveling up their skills was a huge win and I think of it often.
30:59
I have to mention this book because it was a pivotal moment because I thought I was potentially going to lose a few of them and I didn't think they would be able to make that step up and not in a matter of doubt, just a function of whether or not they had what it took to take that next step and get the business to the next level and so that was why this one's near and dear to my heart.
31:20
When you say take the next step the way I'm hearing it, just to make sure we, me and the audience are tracking with you, you're saying that you were talking to the team about, hey, I need you to learn these new skills so you could take more responsibility and more ownership in your role or progress in your ability in the role.
31:37
Is that the idea?
31:39
I think my frustration at the time was like I could see holes and they couldn't.
31:43
Holes in what way?
31:44
Holes in the business?
31:45
Holes in their ability?
31:47
Each in their departments.
31:48
And they were not seeing and recognizing those holes.
31:50
Okay.
31:51
And so I was very frustrated because I realized either, A, I'm going to have to get into the trenches and fight with them and like show them and do a lot of hand to hand with them, or I'm just going to go hire it.
32:01
And because of everything that was happening with at the time Copilot now homeworks, I knew I didn't have the time to individually spend months and months trying to train them up myself or get them convinced that there was holes in their department.
32:13
And it's challenging when you get a lot of public praise because you can start to be like, Oh, we're doing good.
32:20
We are doing good.
32:21
We are doing good.
32:21
When like, I don't know if I'll ever get out of this position where it's like, I see all the holes.
32:26
And when I,
32:28
I felt like they were hearing the good stuff and they were ignoring the holes.
32:33
And for them to be able to be kind of like shift their mindset and like can go in this completely different overdrive, the six to 12 months after that.
32:41
And when I say get the business to the next level, it's like, okay, great, we've got to 150, 200 locations.
32:45
That's not a thousand, then that's the goal.
32:48
And there's a reason why we're not a thousand.
32:50
We have a skill gap and there's these holes in what we support or sales or a command center and these need to be filled.
32:57
And for them to all to be first off, willing for me to replace them if needs be.
33:02
And then secondly, to all dig in, get coaches themselves, get training themselves, be willing to learn and get those skills, uh, was, uh, I'm very thankful for.
33:11
And that's fantastic.
33:13
Did you have to do, or have you done any, we'll call it repeat training with them?
33:19
So like you learn a skill and then how do you like through repetition, you
33:25
you continue to get better at it or, you know, generally whenever we do training, you get a growth in the ability or you get a growth in attention and then it fades over time and then you do more training.
33:34
Did you, have you done any repeat on this or anything of that sort?
33:38
Yeah.
33:38
So like there was a lot of, you know, hard conversations in terms of like being very blunt about here's the things I see as problems and then being as, you know,
33:48
blank check as possible in terms of like, you go solve this and like, whether you need a coach, whether you need an event, whether you know, get a mentor, whether you need a consultant, like you gotta fix this and I'll give you every resource you need.
34:00
But then it was a matter of yes, having the meetings and that the way I doubled my meeting cadence with them.
34:05
And it's actually funny because literally almost two years to the day, because I just finished those meeting cycles, basically slowly getting to the point where we don't even have my weekly one on ones with them.
34:17
But it was a matter of like individually in those three departments, because we kind of have like sales, then we have support for the owners.
34:22
And then we have command center, kind of like the three departments for the leadership.
34:25
And it's Lee, Nick and Liz and individually being okay.
34:30
It's going to take three months to work on.
34:31
It's going to take six months to work on.
34:32
It's going to take 12 months to work on.
34:34
And then just really hammering in on every single meeting the issues and digging deep.
34:40
But I didn't have the time to actually go do it with them.
34:41
I'd do it for them.
34:42
They had to go find the mentor or find the coaching or find all of them got some level of coaching or consulting to be able to go get the skills.
34:52
And so I'm very proud of them.
34:53
I'm very thankful because it's also a risk to go get outside executives at that size because you might jeopardize the culture.
35:00
And so I'm very thankful that they were able to all be maintained.
35:03
For someone that knows they need to have a hard blunt conversation.
35:06
Do you have any quick pointers for them?
35:09
First off, I would say like, so it was funny because last, last year at the Augusta only conference, the leaders, I didn't, hadn't heard their speeches.
35:17
They spoke and they all brought up the, the perspective of basically the previous 12 months.
35:22
And they told the story and it was pretty vicious.
35:24
I was like, I don't think it was that bad, but, um.
35:28
I went off right after them and I said, like pulling out the sword, which is what I did during that.
35:35
I don't know if I've ever done that and I don't think I'll ever do that to them again.
35:38
I think that kind of conversation is a very blunt instrument, anger.
35:42
And I did use it, but it's one of those things where I don't think you should basically ever use it.
35:48
But,
35:50
I think we had built up a lot of rapport and a lot of the relationship capital and all those people had worked with me for so long.
35:55
They knew that that anger was not channeled at them, but it was because I genuinely wanted them to skill up and I wanted to see them win.
36:02
And, um,
36:04
Yeah, it's probably the only time I've ever used anger in any sort of meeting capacity and just been venting.
36:12
Knowing that they would take that and it would take it as a challenge, they would not take it as a threat.
36:18
I think anger in general, that kind of conversation is something to avoid.
36:23
That being said, you're going to have crucial conversations all the time.
36:27
Every time I think of a conversation I need to have now, I go back to that one thing.
36:31
And from that time, there's been so many positive changes.
36:34
I can take this one on.
36:35
This is going to be a good... And I think all of us can agree, you have a good, crucial conversation, even if the person leaves.
36:42
It's never a bad thing afterwards.
36:43
Assuming that you have come into it calculated, and this is why I chose this book, is because it allowed me to come in that conversation very calculated in terms of how I was going to say things, what I was going to say, even though it was an informal meeting at barbecue.
36:56
And I would just recommend anyone that needs to have a crucial conversation, read this book first, because you'll probably take ownership of the problem before you actually even use the blunt instrument of anger or frustration or telling someone that they're doing something wrong.
37:11
If you can take ownership of the employee making a repeated mistake or examine the training that they have or the communication.
37:17
So I was able to like lean on the fact that like I am not giving you the resources.
37:21
I'm giving you the training and now I am unlocking this and allowing you to go like do whatever is required and not make it a personal attack.
37:32
Very good.
37:34
Have you ever had to do that?
37:36
Or most of the time that your initial leadership team kind of grown with the company?
37:41
You mean in terms of telling people they have to level up?
37:44
Level up or we will basically either A, replace you or hire above you.
37:49
Oh, sure.
37:50
Oh, of course.
37:51
Absolutely.
37:52
I, it's terrible.
37:54
I mean, it's not the fun part of the business, but yeah.
37:57
I don't know that I've ever had to do it.
38:02
I don't know that I've ever had – I can't remember.
38:04
I've been doing this a while.
38:05
But I don't remember like a moment where it's like really, really angry.
38:09
I might be really angry to myself.
38:13
And then by the time I've presented it to them, I have delivered it in a different way.
38:21
But I just can't remember on that front if I've ever had that exact experience.
38:25
But yeah, of course, there's been a whole lot of people.
38:28
It generally comes from a place where I see this person is incredibly capable and they're just not living up to it.
38:36
That's been a big one.
38:38
I think...
38:39
Trying to think how this has worked out.
38:40
I would say it's maybe I'm making this up, but I'd say it's probably worked out 50% of the time.
38:45
So you said it worked out great for all three people.
38:47
I don't feel like I've had that level of success.
38:49
I feel like, you know, sometimes it works out, but sometimes.
38:54
Maybe what I, the feeling I already had where this person's capable, but they're never going to do it.
39:00
The conversation didn't change anything for the long term.
39:02
It only changed things for a week or a month.
39:04
And then ultimately they had to be removed.
39:06
That's been my experience probably at least half the time.
39:09
Yeah, yeah.
39:11
So.
39:11
Yeah, I would say like less crucial conversations are times you're right.
39:15
Most time when you think someone's not going to have the skill or the ability to step up, they can't.
39:19
Usually they can't.
39:20
And that's why I was so thankful for this conversation.
39:23
And this book specifically helped me, I think, give me some tools in terms of words and how to approach certain things and when to push and then when to back up based upon how they were reacting.
39:36
I'm just really thankful for this book.
39:37
That's why I had to put it in here.
39:39
I think everyone should read it.
39:40
This is a phenomenal leadership book.
39:42
It sounds like it's for sure.
39:44
It's one of the most important things we do in our businesses, in our roles.
39:47
So it sounds incredible.
39:49
I've not read it.
39:49
I've never read any of his books, but I'm familiar with him.
39:52
Yeah, we now give every new owner a copy when they come up to training because I just think it's so important.
39:58
Okay.
39:59
You said it was leadership and tactics?
40:01
Leadership strategy and tactics.
40:04
Strategy.
40:05
Field manual.
40:06
Yeah.
40:07
Okay.
40:08
My second one is a book called Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson.
40:13
It's actually not his name.
40:14
His name's Mark Ford.
40:16
That was just a fake name he wrote under.
40:17
Oh, really?
40:18
I did not know that.
40:19
Yeah.
40:19
Yeah.
40:20
Yeah, he wrote most of his books under Michael Masterson.
40:23
Okay.
40:23
And so that's my favorite of his books.
40:25
And he's incredibly successful.
40:28
And he is a phenomenal marketer and a very successful business person, not just a marketer, across a variety of domains from marketing.
40:41
selling newsletters and information to real estate to just a whole bunch of he's been involved in a lot of businesses and invested in a bunch of businesses so he's got a lot of experience this book is an old book and flipping through it the thing and i couldn't have articulated exactly what it was that i got from the book i just it's always been a book that i've highly valued you know something i'll say about these books i think a book
41:04
can hit at a different time depending on what you need.
41:07
So there was something I needed when I read each of the books that I'm talking about today.
41:12
And that's why they struck a chord for me.
41:14
It's entirely possible for you, if you're listening, that you might read this and you may not get that.
41:20
You're like, that's fine.
41:21
I don't get it.
41:22
Well, there's usually what I think grabs us is we've got a problem.
41:26
And there's something in that book that answers, that provides a solution.
41:29
And so I don't remember exactly what my problem would have been back in this time.
41:34
But as I flipped through it, here were, here are three things I, when I was flipping through, I was like, okay, well, maybe it could have been something like this.
41:40
So one thing that he talks a lot about in the book is making offers.
41:46
So I would have back then been in very heavy marketing mode.
41:51
I was trying to figure out, we, we had successfully, I had successfully sold a,
41:57
work in commercial.
41:59
But I was not, I was struggling to figure out how to effectively get residential homeowners as clients.
42:07
So this is probably, would have read this book at the very beginning of City Turf.
42:11
And...
42:12
I was just really having a hard time making the leap.
42:15
I was looking at what so many other people were doing for marketing and they had real and I hired a friend of mine.
42:20
She did great design.
42:22
I designed some really, really nice looking pieces, but they just didn't perform.
42:27
And I just I was finding it to I was like, how am I ever going to grow this business?
42:33
because this stuff, it's going to be too expensive and this stuff isn't working that good.
42:37
And that is what led me down the path of studying everything I could on marketing.
42:43
And that's where in Dan Kennedy, if you've heard me mention Dan, that was one of the first people, Jay Abraham.
42:48
There's a variety of people who were the first people.
42:51
And Mark would have been one of these people as well.
42:54
And so I think one of the things I probably took from his book and he had built big businesses was this idea that you have to move really fast.
43:01
It's the whole concept of ready, fire, aim.
43:04
And you have to move really fast in marketing as well.
43:06
And so it's not about perfection.
43:09
It's about how can I just – how can I take a very – again, it's been a long time since I've read this book.
43:15
This is my take on what I think it probably said.
43:18
It's how can I –
43:21
arrive at an offer to a prospect, something that will be of interest to them that I think will get them to buy, which based on my experience, leads me to believe this thing will work.
43:34
And then just get it in front of a small group of people and test it.
43:38
Watch what happens, hear what they say, see the results and then iterate.
43:43
Iterate, test, and it's all about speed.
43:46
It's like go fast.
43:47
And that...
43:50
would have probably flown in the face of many of the other things I had been learning, which was about creating systems.
43:58
Last week, I mentioned the E-Myth.
44:00
The E-Myth, to me, I would have at that time in my life interpreted the E-Myth as slow down, perfection, get it right, follow the system.
44:10
And there was a lot of stuff like that, that I would have been learning in business.
44:15
And then people like Dan, or people like
44:19
And Mark Ford would have been saying, no, no, no, no.
44:22
Test faster, quicker, fail faster.
44:26
Get it out there.
44:26
Try things.
44:27
And that has if you ask anybody in service autopilot world, the two words I always said, let's just test it.
44:35
And let's step into it.
44:37
Like, let's just try it.
44:38
And I probably got it from places like this.
44:41
And I tried it.
44:42
It's like, oh, this works.
44:43
And so anytime, like if we talk about price increases and you're like, how do you do a price increase?
44:47
First thing I'm going to tell you, I don't know, raise the price on 10 people and see what happens.
44:51
Like that, this is that concept coming to life.
44:54
And so I, I guessing that maybe this is one of the places I got it.
44:59
And so go fast was the idea and try and iterate.
45:02
You can always change it, but you don't go out to a million people.
45:06
You go out to a small group and just try things.
45:08
Another one that I think I might've got from him and it's been reinforced elsewhere is,
45:16
And I've spent a lot of time in software.
45:17
The thing you have to remember is I always wanted to be in software.
45:20
I never wanted to actually be in the services businesses.
45:23
My first business was 23 or not my first business.
45:26
My first what I call real business was in software when I was 23.
45:30
And so in the software world, there's this concept that if you build a great product, the users will show up.
45:40
They'll come.
45:41
And so you really try to make the product amazing and easy and fantastic.
45:46
And then people will flock to it because there will be word of mouth.
45:49
And so starting early in my career, that would have been a pervasive thought way back.
45:54
Now I'm doing things in services, and I don't believe that, by the way.
45:59
But I think it can help, but it's not the sole answer.
46:03
And so then as my career progresses, I start consuming information like Mark Ford, and
46:10
and Dan and other people, Jay Abraham and these different people, and they're all saying, no, no, no, no, no.
46:17
The way you win is you have a great product and then you have even better marketing and you outspend everybody else.
46:24
And that would have been the messaging that would have been coming from Mark.
46:27
It's like you have to have a great product.
46:31
That's table stakes.
46:33
Yeah.
46:33
But that isn't going to win the game.
46:35
A lot of people think I'm really great at my craft.
46:38
Why isn't my business growing?
46:39
I'm the best at doing stonework.
46:41
I'm the best at doing this thing.
46:42
It's because nobody has the faintest idea who you are.
46:46
Like nobody.
46:46
You we think they people know who we are.
46:49
We think people have heard of us.
46:50
They haven't they haven't heard of us.
46:52
They don't know who we are.
46:53
And so these guys like Mark would have been getting into my mind this idea that I have to figure out how to
47:01
be a better marketer than everybody else, get more marketing into the market.
47:05
And I have to figure out how to sell a lot or be able to spend a bunch on marketing more than my competitors.
47:11
That's the winning strategy, which then we get to my third point that I theorized I got from him.
47:15
He was very much, if you want to build something really big, tens and tens of millions, you can almost never do it with one product.
47:21
even if the product could go to, whether or not this is true or not, we've seen lots of software products that have built massive companies, but generally you can't build a really big business.
47:31
So I think his tagline was $100 million business back then.
47:35
And so, that's what 100 million was like, hundreds, several hundred million dollars.
47:40
And so he was talking along those lines.
47:42
If you wanna get really big, you're gonna have to have more products in your business to get there.
47:47
That always stuck in my mind, but,
47:49
Another point to that was the more products you have, and this is one you guys have probably heard many times, the more products you have, the more you sell back to your client, the more you can spend to get a client.
47:58
So those would have been some of the big themes that I was getting from this book back at that time.
48:04
That's good.
48:04
Yeah, Alex has actually mentioned this book.
48:07
Oh, has he?
48:08
I think it influenced some of his offers book.
48:11
Oh, okay, yeah, and I think
48:14
Mark might have done an offers book.
48:16
I can't remember.
48:17
I've got several.
48:18
He's done.
48:18
I have several books from him.
48:20
I'll have to look at it.
48:20
I'll have to look up that name because I've read that book.
48:22
I never knew he had other books.
48:24
Yeah.
48:24
His other books are probably under.
48:26
I don't know.
48:26
It's been so long.
48:27
They're probably under Michael Masterson.
48:29
Okay.
48:31
I haven't read any of his stuff or anything like that in a long time, but I do the probably one of the only blogs that I still look at is actually Mark Ford.
48:39
It's probably not going to be super interesting to most people, but I, I,
48:44
Because he was influential on me two decades ago, I still will look at his stuff and read what he has to say.
48:53
So when you heard that, which of your businesses did you actually start thinking about spending a lot on marketing?
49:00
Was it still CityTurf at that time?
49:02
That was CityTurf.
49:03
Because I know Service Autopilot, you really didn't take the paid strategy.
49:07
Was there a difference there, did you feel?
49:10
I had started...
49:12
to and when it came to the service autopilot business, I had started to believe we did paid.
49:18
So I actually started doing paid early, but I wasn't getting great traction at it.
49:26
And I was getting traction on content.
49:28
And so back then I had started to believe that content was the angle.
49:33
And, uh, but I, but I hadn't yet realized it was YouTube content.
49:38
I was doing other content and content was the thing that was working best for us.
49:42
Then I did YouTube that worked really well, like really, really well.
49:47
And so we were taking more of an educational content approach from the very beginning inside that business.
49:53
And that was what was working best.
49:55
And, you know, it's like one of those really challenging things at that time was, uh,
50:03
It's just so different than today.
50:04
We needed every dollar for engineers.
50:07
Like that's where all the money went in that business.
50:09
And so it didn't leave us.
50:10
And I was putting $20,000 a month into that business out of my own pocket.
50:15
And so, and I didn't take an income for three years.
50:18
And John didn't take an income.
50:20
And for probably two years.
50:23
And so it just felt like I did not have the money in that business.
50:27
Because CityTurf, I wasn't making crazy money off CityTurf back then.
50:31
CityTurf was like in go mode.
50:33
When I started service autopilot, CityTurf was just under a million dollars.
50:37
Oh, wow.
50:38
Yeah.
50:38
So we were taking, I didn't take any money out of city turf for quite a while.
50:43
I don't think until 2013 or 12, I can't remember 12 is I think when my life got really good starting.
50:46
I can't remember now, but it doesn't matter.
50:47
But the point was I was in a position where all the money was going to engineering because you had just, we had to build everything.
50:50
And so I was trying to find every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every, every
51:02
affordable way to do sales and marketing and funnel all the money there with the plan that eventually would flip.
51:09
And so that's why I was I tried ads, but I always kept the budget smaller.
51:14
But the content always performed so much better.
51:16
Going to things like GIE performed so much better than even ads for me back then.
51:21
And so we were doing a lot of that speaking.
51:23
I got a lot of stuff from speaking.
51:25
So that's the, I was doing a lot of that stuff that were more my time or less dollars.
51:30
So you're right.
51:31
I wasn't applying all that in that business.
51:33
I was applying in the city turf business.
51:36
It kind of actually reminds me of this one book, I'm failing in the memory, the name of it, but it talks a lot about Red Bull and how they made their marketing, like the marketing angle of like their sports and all the rest of it.
51:48
Basically it made the media part into their marketing arm that was profitable.
51:53
And that was a huge inspiration to me.
51:55
And that's not the book for me, but like just this concept of marketing and where you spend your money is making the marketing, whether it be content, trying to get that to become a profitable arm of the business.
52:05
That's actually why we have the third leg of a stool, which is the media side for like the whole co is like, okay, can we spend millions of dollars on creating content, but at least break even on it because we're able to at least monetize like the web design side, for example.
52:21
And so that's how I've always, it's always been like that third leg of school.
52:24
Like, can I spend gobs of money on the content, i.e.
52:27
marketing, but at least break even or have like a five to 10% margin on it?
52:31
And we just put every dollar back in as much as possible.
52:33
And that's inspired by a lot by Red Bull.
52:36
Hmm, interesting.
52:37
I think on every business, so if you do a bunch of businesses, there is no...
52:43
Well, this worked over at this business, so we're going to do it at the new business.
52:46
Every business, like CityTurf took a very different, completely different marketing strategy than Service AllPyot.
52:52
When I did the cleaning business, that was a completely different marketing strategy to grow that business.
52:55
That was nothing like the other two.
52:59
I think one of the things, and we talk about, it takes three to five years.
53:04
I like to talk in terms of five years to figure something out.
53:06
Even if you have tons of experience and you have lots of money, and you start a new business, you gotta figure out the customer, you gotta figure out the best way to get to them, you gotta figure out the best way to talk to them, you gotta figure out the best channels, you gotta figure out the best product, the way to deliver the product, way to position the product.
53:20
That's why it takes a while.
53:22
And unless you're, if you're selling a green industry business and starting a green industry business, you know what to do.
53:27
But if you're going from,
53:29
to a different kind of business, you've got to still figure all this stuff out all over again.
53:33
So it's never been exactly the same for me in anything I've done because I've always done slightly different things.
53:40
Going back to that book and how he talked about scaling the paid ad side, do you feel like when you sold Service Autopilot, there was ever a conversation or is held against you that it was just the content and you had not got a paid acquisition channel firing?
53:55
Or did they not really hold that against you?
53:57
From a valuation perspective, I guess you'd say.
54:02
They must not have because we had so many people in the process.
54:06
True.
54:06
There was a number of things I was worried about
54:10
That so I would have been worried about the fact that I was pretty visible in the company.
54:16
Like I was kind of I was the content marketing.
54:18
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
54:20
I would have been worried about the long care millionaire brand, which is kind of the same thing.
54:25
I would have been worried about Academy, the coaching thing.
54:28
uh people didn't value that i could just tell you right off the bat they didn't give a flip about that nobody valued that we didn't get paid for that and so they're gonna do to it afterwards nobody nobody like and we talked to like we again i've said before we had 27 formal offers we took eight people like very serious down to the end we took three companies through due diligence at the
54:50
I think I have quite a bit of data here.
54:52
It wasn't like I had one buyer.
54:53
I mean, there was eight, and these were big names.
54:56
Some of the names that would have been buying us normally didn't buy companies our size.
55:00
They were buying bigger companies.
55:01
Like they were doing billion dollar deals.
55:04
And so they didn't, weren't as bothered by these things as much.
55:11
The group that did buy us loved, loved the content side.
55:16
And they wanted to bring all of that to the rest of their portfolio companies because they saw the economics on it.
55:22
And they also saw they felt that we had a better NPS and we had a better...
55:31
like relationship and community.
55:33
And they wanted to, they wanted me to help.
55:35
In fact, I spoke throughout the, that, that group multiple times to multiple companies and went to them and saw them.
55:41
And, but the reality was that, and so they were very interested in it, but whenever COVID happened and the whole strategy changed, it was the plan changed.
55:51
Like,
55:52
Things changed from the original plan.
55:53
Then it just became about how can we hit the numbers as fast as we can hit the numbers.
55:57
That whole thing went out the window because content is a longer term play.
56:03
And when we were doing the deal, they were all in on the longer play.
56:06
They got it and they wanted to bring it to the rest of the companies.
56:08
But when they shifted to it's time to go public.
56:12
Uh, then it was, and I totally understand if you're going public, you like, it's a different game.
56:17
You have to show profits to the market and they were highly concerned.
56:20
I learned this.
56:21
I didn't know this before.
56:22
You have to nail your numbers for two years after going public or it's disastrous.
56:27
And so they needed to have very, very predictable revenue from the time we went public for the next many years.
56:35
And so everybody's appetite for investing, everybody's appetite for trying things for the long term goes away because you can't miss.
56:44
And so that's what happened.
56:46
But so that group in particular, I actually think it was an advantage for us on the sale that we were that way.
56:53
But to many, I would suspect normally no.
56:55
Yeah.
56:57
So that was a lot of, I hope that was helpful to you.
56:59
That's a lot of information.
57:01
Yeah, I'm like, at that moment, like where it's like, do it, like we're just starting to do the paid stuff for the first time ever.
57:07
And just saying, trying to see, okay, with, does paid perform really well because of the content?
57:12
And just trying to test that.
57:14
So my theory is it would perform better because of the content.
57:17
Yeah, so far so good.
57:19
We'll see.
57:19
Only a week and a half into it.
57:21
Okay.
57:21
I would absolutely think it would outperform because of, I mean, that would be my bet.
57:25
Who knows to you.
57:27
I don't know how you run this test.
57:29
You'll never know because you did all the content.
57:31
You can't.
57:32
There's no way to take the opposite side of that trade.
57:34
True.
57:35
No.
57:35
Yeah.
57:35
But how would it not if your ad is showing up?
57:38
I mean, as long as they like you.
57:40
Now, if they don't like you, then that probably hurt it.
57:44
But I would think it absolutely makes the content work better, much in the same way that it's different, but much in the same way if you've got a bazillion trucks running around the market, when they see your advertising on their door or on Facebook, it works better because they already trust you in the sense that
58:02
they have seen you and they believe, oh, I've seen them a million times, they must be okay.
58:06
In your case, the trust is even higher if they consume your content.
58:10
And so how could it not support it?
58:12
I would think the economics are much better.
58:15
We'll find out.
58:15
Yeah.
58:16
What's the next for you?
58:18
If you don't mind, can I use the restroom real quick?
58:20
Absolutely, go for it.
58:21
Two seconds.
58:21
Yeah, yeah, do it.
58:23
Sorry, drinking water and caffeine all day long doesn't make a great combination.
58:27
Not a problem.
58:29
Cool.
58:29
All right.
58:30
Book number three.
58:31
All right.
58:31
So this one is, again, I don't think any of these three books are going to take the best books.
58:36
These are to your point where you had whatever that means, like, yeah, like, like the ones that I, when I look at the cover, I'm like, I can remember a moment and what it did for me.
58:46
And so this one is, uh, one that if you are, if you don't like curse words, don't listen to it.
58:53
This was a little hardcore.
58:55
You know, right down Jonathan's lane, you know, putting people in cages and, you know, locking out his family and everything.
59:01
Okay.
59:02
That's it.
59:02
Yeah.
59:02
Yeah.
59:03
This is, it's relentless.
59:05
It's from, the title of the book is From Good to Great to Unstoppable.
59:09
And it's from Tim Grover.
59:10
Don't know it.
59:12
Yeah, so it's actually a look at the Tim Grover was the coach for Michael Jordan.
59:18
And so he tells a lot of stories and anecdotes about Michael Jordan, how he handled his play on the court, off the court, etc.
59:25
He kind of classifies people into three different categories.
59:28
type of people and he looks specifically at basketball players, but it says in business as well.
59:34
So there's coolers, closers, and cleaners.
59:37
Coolers perform decently and they're adequate.
59:42
Closers deliver under pressure, that's a good closer.
59:45
But then cleaners just continuously push the standard higher
59:48
And he was talking about how Michael Jordan was a cleaner.
59:53
He talks about how even in a business sense, the cleaner, the person that comes out, and they know all the details, they know all the problems about the business, etc.
59:59
The person that cleans the office.
1:00:02
And...
1:00:03
The reason this book kind of speak to me because he's very harsh and very crass, very hardcore, very hardcore.
1:00:10
And even if you hear Tim Grover speak now, he's I think maybe early 60s.
1:00:17
I know he had a bout with cancer.
1:00:19
I still believe he's with us.
1:00:20
Mercy.
1:00:21
But very hardcore person.
1:00:24
And he had, I think, a pretty tough upbringing.
1:00:26
But I think the reason it spoke to me, this was –
1:00:31
kind of at a time when I was, I wanted more from life.
1:00:35
And I remember specifically running up a mountain, Oyster Dome up in Bellingham, Washington, and listening to this book.
1:00:45
And he talked about embracing the dark side, the side of you that maybe other people would say is bad, or you've been taught as bad, or like, you know, it's there.
1:00:53
And being able to tap into it and use it as fuel towards whatever you're trying to achieve.
1:00:59
And he talks a lot about controlling the dark side.
1:01:03
So, for example, he mentions Tiger Woods, how he has a dark side lets it completely ruin his career, ruin his life, ruin his family, the whole nine yards.
1:01:11
But then being able to take what might have been a bad experience in your life or something that causes you to go to that dark side, but be able to use it for the positive and embracing it and channeling it and trying to figure out how to make it something that actually is your competitive advantage.
1:01:26
And so
1:01:27
I get, he got talks, Alex uses this phrase too, is like run dirty on run fuel dirty, which is like, sometimes when you're out.
1:01:34
You know, a four-wheeler got dirty fuel, but it's like, it's all I got.
1:01:38
And so whether it be anger or a chip on your shoulder or someone said something negative, like use whatever you have to go to that place that you need to be able to channel that inner dark side is what he calls it, to be able to perform.
1:01:50
And he talks about how, you know, people like Kobe Bryant, he talks about basketball because he's just a basketball coach.
1:01:55
But there's a lot of really good things in there for me to just –
1:01:59
at the time, like kind of like, you know, you're figuring out your life and you're, I was switching away from college into business and be like, okay, like it's, it's okay for me to want more.
1:02:07
It's okay for me to want to accomplish more and tap into this competitive side of me.
1:02:13
And I need to channel it.
1:02:15
I need to put guards on it, but there's a way to be able to,
1:02:19
push it, push me, allow it to use, use it to push me closer to my goals.
1:02:24
And he's the hardcore.
1:02:25
So again, very, very lots of asterisks.
1:02:27
And that's the most you would not listen to this around kids.
1:02:31
But it was a certainly a wake up call.
1:02:33
I kind of like that you talk about like going hardcore.
1:02:37
It was the hardcore moment for me is like I'm going all in.
1:02:39
And this was when I was like, hey, I'm
1:02:42
kind of like what riley's going through right now which is like not really going through the girlfriend thing you're just locked in no friends and and being okay with it and realizing what sacrifices and trades i was going to make for that uh and entering that period like it was the thing that got me into that mode for a solid 10 years did you ever read the grant i didn't read it but the grant cardone 10x book oh yeah oh yeah is it that kind of a book
1:03:05
Um, Grant's is more motivational.
1:03:07
Okay.
1:03:07
This one is very much more going at competitive spirit.
1:03:12
Competitive, okay.
1:03:14
It is not a hype up.
1:03:18
10x is very much like, basically, you get into the title, just go massive, just go big, which is definitely useful.
1:03:24
I think it's much more motivational, though, whereas this is almost like the dark side.
1:03:27
There's dark parts of you, there's things that you might try to hide, but you can tap into these and use them to, in a moment of crisis, push through.
1:03:37
Yeah, I would say similar, similar idea, though.
1:03:41
Tim Grover spoke at Grant's events several times.
1:03:44
Oh, yes.
1:03:44
OK, I asked because Riley, the first business book Riley ever read was 10x.
1:03:49
Yeah, it's a great entry level.
1:03:50
He was 15, 14, and I had to talk him off the ledge.
1:03:55
Really?
1:03:56
What?
1:03:57
He really wanted to figure out how to get his sleep down to a couple hours a night.
1:04:01
I'm like, Riley, no, no.
1:04:02
Oh my, at 15?
1:04:04
Yeah.
1:04:04
Savage.
1:04:05
I can't remember all the other, Riley's like, I want to be a billionaire.
1:04:09
I want to, like, all these things.
1:04:12
I'm like, whoa, okay, okay.
1:04:13
Well, this sounds like a good book, but that's going a little too far here.
1:04:19
So that's what made me add.
1:04:20
I'm going to go look at this book.
1:04:21
What is going on?
1:04:25
So that was your experience.
1:04:27
Do you think if somebody else were to read this book –
1:04:31
if you're recommending since it was personal and valuable to you, do you think they would get a similar thing from it?
1:04:36
Or do you think a person gets a very different thing from it?
1:04:39
Okay.
1:04:40
I have not gone back to this book.
1:04:41
It's just the one that I can point to that has a big impact on my life.
1:04:46
And I think what's funny is since AI has come out in the past year, I have not read a book or listened to an entire book.
1:04:52
I just synthesize do like the 15 to 20 minute summary going through my AI.
1:04:56
So it's customized to my businesses.
1:04:58
Uh, but, uh,
1:05:01
If you, these are like, I have more obviously a whole bunch of impactful books, but these are the ones where I can put like something massive changed right there.
1:05:08
And I just remember like running the mountain and like, oh, I'm going in my dark, I'm going to my hole and it's gonna take me five or 10 years.
1:05:14
And I understand exactly what I'm trading off for this, but it's worth it and I wanna do it.
1:05:18
And I'm not gonna judge myself for it, so.
1:05:21
That's good.
1:05:22
You got me thinking when you just said what you said.
1:05:25
I feel like since AI and lately, I keep buying business books.
1:05:30
I was bringing up my- I just screenshot them.
1:05:32
I screenshot them.
1:05:33
We went to a bookstore the other day.
1:05:34
I took a picture of one of all of these books, a couple of other old timers, and then just had them all synthesized through AI.
1:05:41
I'm like, sorry guys.
1:05:42
I know it's like the whole copywriting thing.
1:05:45
Yeah, I'm scrolling through my books.
1:05:49
And I keep buying business books, but I don't think I've read any of them.
1:05:55
I've had, I've never read it.
1:05:57
You're a window shopper.
1:05:58
I was like, this is a great book.
1:06:00
I should read this or I'll listen to the first chapter.
1:06:02
And then I just don't, which is not how I used to work.
1:06:07
I've wanted to read Alex Hormosi's books.
1:06:12
And I just don't do it.
1:06:16
I figured now that I'm working again, there's going to be little tidbits in there.
1:06:19
There'll be reminders of old books.
1:06:20
I just haven't done it.
1:06:22
Yeah, I'm just...
1:06:24
Anyway, you got me thinking.
1:06:24
I think I do the same thing.
1:06:28
All right.
1:06:29
Um, yeah, I don't know what else to ask you about that book.
1:06:31
I'd have to, you know, experience it to know what to ask.
1:06:34
It's a little, little, little, little anecdotes from Michael Jordan's life, which obviously are all sports related, but I, I had like, again, at that moment, I could read that book today and probably be like, oh man, oh, what are we talking about, but it was what I needed at the moment, which is like a little bit of the opposite side of the coin.
1:06:51
which is not always necessarily the pleasant side of like, be nice to everyone and make sure everyone's feelings are, are okay.
1:06:57
But like, sometimes you got to go a little hardcore.
1:06:59
So that's good.
1:07:01
So my last book, yeah, my last one is the ultimate sales machine by Chet Holmes.
1:07:06
It's good.
1:07:07
Yeah.
1:07:07
And same kind of thing.
1:07:10
It's back in a time when I'm trying to figure out a whole bunch of stuff.
1:07:13
It's the early days of city turf, trying to figure it out.
1:07:17
And this book I read several times and I could have actually, I flipped it open and kind of flipped through it to try to remind myself, but I could have given you a few things from it without even looking at the book.
1:07:30
So,
1:07:31
One would be he really pushes on this idea that you figure out a few things that you become really good at and you just do them over and over and over again and get incredibly good at them where they're just second nature.
1:07:46
And that could take all kinds of forms.
1:07:48
It could be a sales pitch.
1:07:50
It could be the team practicing overcoming objections.
1:07:53
It could be following up on estimates.
1:07:56
It could be refining a sales pitch.
1:07:58
video over and over again, like until you just become incredibly good at creating video sales letters, whatever it is, like incredibly good at email marketing.
1:08:07
You just, it's this idea that you find a thing and you just go down the rabbit hole on that thing and you become incredible at it.
1:08:14
And your team models the exact same thing.
1:08:17
That'd be one.
1:08:19
To me, that one's kind of self explanatory.
1:08:21
Just like, I think the way I said it, hopefully it made sense to everyone.
1:08:24
Another would be
1:08:25
And this was answering a big question for me.
1:08:27
This would have, whether it probably didn't come, it probably came more of what I'm about to say from like a Gary Halbert or a Dan, but definitely chat would have been supporting.
1:08:35
I'm talking about Dan Kennedy.
1:08:38
Chat would have been supporting this.
1:08:39
And it's just this idea of this persistence.
1:08:45
I guess you could say it like persistence is a strategy.
1:08:47
Maybe you could say it that way.
1:08:48
And here's what I mean by that.
1:08:49
I remember trying to figure out when I was doing marketing, what,
1:08:54
Should we hit a zip code one time or should I hit a little bit of the zip code over and over again?
1:09:02
Should I mail a person one time or over and over again?
1:09:06
It was that kind of a concept.
1:09:09
Like, should I, it's, do I go after a broader group of people or a tiny group of people?
1:09:13
And it kind of, I, if I'm remembering back then, it kind of made sense to me that you'd go after a small group of people, but it was also like, well, then.
1:09:23
that means there's a smaller pool of potential buyers and this is a game of math.
1:09:27
And so if I'm only going after a small group and I can only get 2% of them, that's a smaller number.
1:09:33
And so I would have been questioning if I was thinking about it right.
1:09:36
And someone like a Chet Holmes or a Dan Kennedy would have given me permission and an understanding that no, the way you win is you go deep and you go after a small group hard, over and over and over again.
1:09:50
And so that persistence concept would have resonated, which would have been one that I got confidence that that wasn't in fact the path.
1:09:58
And then it led right into the next one, which was he, I don't know if it was his concept actually, but it was a concept called the dream 100.
1:10:06
And the dream 100 is what- Could I pause and talk about what you just said for real quick?
1:10:11
Yeah, please, please.
1:10:12
Because I was just, because like what year did that Chet Holmes make the book?
1:10:16
Do you remember?
1:10:16
No idea.
1:10:18
I'm assuming it's a long time ago.
1:10:20
Like was it a lot about print?
1:10:22
Was it a lot about print?
1:10:23
Oh yeah, yeah.
1:10:24
Yeah, he was using a lot of examples of magazine companies and they were doing print.
1:10:31
They were selling magazine.
1:10:35
I can't remember how it worked.
1:10:36
He was running divisions of magazines within a big organization.
1:10:40
I don't remember now.
1:10:41
But, yeah, it was all very – it feels old.
1:10:44
He's been dead for a long time.
1:10:45
He died young in his early 50s or something like that.
1:10:48
And so – I was just thinking because –
1:10:51
When it comes to digital, how we can do that now is similar.
1:10:55
You try to hit the same person over and over.
1:10:56
But what we try to do is we actually try to do an awareness campaign, for example, on Facebook or Google, get in front of as many people to drive into the site to hit the pixel.
1:11:06
And then we retarget over and over and over from different angles.
1:11:09
And so it's a little bit of a refinement on that, but similar philosophy just on the digital side, which is show any interest and I will just keep pounding.
1:11:17
That's why everyone's like, oh, it's listening to me.
1:11:18
It's knowing you probably did something online.
1:11:21
It now knows you have interest and someone's retargeting you.
1:11:24
Yeah.
1:11:24
And then,
1:11:26
Yeah, this book would have been before all of that.
1:11:29
He wouldn't have been talking about any of those concepts in this book.
1:11:32
But and also when we talk about going after somebody over and over again, I don't know, have no idea if he talked about things like this in The Ultimate Sales Machine.
1:11:40
But a Dane Kennedy or some of the other copywriters would have talked about like when you're going back after somebody and so you're going after them, it's not you're not just sending them the exact same thing all the time.
1:11:50
Yeah.
1:11:50
You're iterating the message.
1:11:51
You're iterating the offer.
1:11:53
Sometimes you might be sending the same thing, but you've just changed a couple things about it.
1:11:57
Or you send them the same thing and say, hey, at the top, you might have missed this one to make sure you didn't miss it.
1:12:02
Offer expires in five days.
1:12:04
That's how these guys would have talked about this stuff back then.
1:12:07
It's hitting people from different angles.
1:12:09
So if you're thinking about marketing and you're thinking about marketing to pain,
1:12:14
And I'm trying to think about how do I bring in a client?
1:12:16
It's another argument for having multiple services to sell.
1:12:19
I don't know if they need mowing right now, but they might have an irrigation problem.
1:12:23
They might have bugs.
1:12:24
They might have weeds.
1:12:25
I could come in to that relationship in all these different directions, make them a client, and then on the back end of my sales machine, I sell them into past.
1:12:33
I sell them into irrigation.
1:12:34
I sell them into the other thing.
1:12:36
It's that.
1:12:36
So persistence of strategy can take many forms.
1:12:40
One form is just...
1:12:42
Going after them.
1:12:43
Going to get them.
1:12:44
Another one is the same thing.
1:12:46
We're going after them, but we're hitting them in all these different ways.
1:12:48
We're being very strategic about it in messaging or what we're trying to sell, selling a different product, things like that.
1:12:54
Do you remember when you read this, like did what you specifically changed?
1:12:57
Was it just the overall philosophy of going at the same person from different angles and refining your target market?
1:13:06
Or was there an actual definitive moment in like with Citi specifically, you changed something?
1:13:11
Yeah.
1:13:11
The next one is one of the things I changed.
1:13:14
And then it was giving me answers around, this is my recollection, you know, as they say,
1:13:22
It's easy to have revisionist history here.
1:13:24
What I think it was doing for me at the time was it was answering this question of how do I target a market?
1:13:32
Because remember, this is probably I'm guessing this is like year one of CityTurf and I had come.
1:13:37
I come from the movie theater cleaning business where we flew people around the country to the movie theater event in Las Vegas.
1:13:44
We sponsored their baseball kid, your kid's baseball team.
1:13:48
We had tickets at all kinds of sporting events and we take theater managers to events.
1:13:53
I guess it was a totally different way to sell.
1:13:55
So now I'm coming into a world of...
1:13:59
Oh, and then before that, I was doing software.
1:14:00
So I'm flying around the country to logistics companies as an early 20s kid, you know, in the boardroom talking to the executives about the software.
1:14:09
Like completely different way.
1:14:11
Like those ways to sell had zero to do with building city turf.
1:14:15
Like they didn't apply or work at all.
1:14:18
And I'm not.
1:14:19
Having I'm not figuring out how I'm going to get the city turf business to go.
1:14:23
That's so that's what was happening.
1:14:24
And so what I think was this book was answering for me was how do you think about targeting a market?
1:14:31
And how do you think about spreading out your market?
1:14:34
How do you think about talking to that audience?
1:14:36
It's those were the things I think this was.
1:14:39
It was like, let's call it giving me permission to say, oh, oh, I don't want to market to all of the zip code.
1:14:44
I want to market to these areas or I serve nine zip codes.
1:14:47
I want to only go after this zip code.
1:14:49
Something else I think it might have been answering for me back then was also I was trying to figure out who to go after.
1:14:56
And so intuitively, you're like, we'll go after the bigger homes or go after the people have the most money.
1:15:02
And in the very beginning of study turf, I decided that was not the strategy.
1:15:05
Yeah.
1:15:06
And so it was these kind of books were answering questions for me about who my ideal client was.
1:15:13
It was just to go a little further with that.
1:15:15
We had learned pretty quickly.
1:15:17
It wasn't the client with the most money.
1:15:19
They created a different problem for us that we didn't want to build our business around.
1:15:24
And so we went a step down from that affluent client.
1:15:27
And these books would have been answering those questions.
1:15:31
Did I answer what you were asking?
1:15:33
No, super, super good.
1:15:34
I think even when we had met a few days ago when we were talking about a business, and it's like finding the ideal customer profile is the unlock, and until you do that, it's hard to message them, it's hard to talk to them, it's hard to communicate to them, because you don't even,
1:15:47
The difference between an affluent, for example, back to more of the lawn care examples, like the difference between going marking to an affluent customer versus even a little bit below that completely changes your copywriting, completely changes your offer, completely changes the design in some elements, how you staff your phone service.
1:16:04
Like if you don't know who the customer is, you literally can't market effectively.
1:16:09
And so I think it's super, super key.
1:16:11
Yeah, totally.
1:16:13
So the third point, this was the biggest one I got from him was this concept of the dream 100.
1:16:18
And it was from a sales standpoint.
1:16:20
And so in other words, again, my recollection from reading a book a very long time ago, but I did read it a couple times.
1:16:28
He has a sales team.
1:16:29
And the sales team identifies the
1:16:33
I think they were selling ads in magazines.
1:16:35
I think that's what it was.
1:16:36
And so his team, so let's just say they own Sports Illustrated, hypothetically.
1:16:42
And so...
1:16:44
So we want to find advertisers for Sports Illustrated.
1:16:48
So who would be the right advertiser in the magazine Sports Illustrated?
1:16:53
Who has the budget to do the two-page article?
1:16:56
Like who has the money to spend a ton with us?
1:17:01
And that group, we identify them.
1:17:05
And we put a lot of thought into who are they?
1:17:07
That becomes our dream, as he called it, 100 clients.
1:17:10
We are going to, and this goes back to my previous point, persistence.
1:17:13
We are going to own these people.
1:17:14
They don't know it yet, but they are going to be mine.
1:17:17
That it's that kind of a mindset.
1:17:19
And Dan would Kennedy talked about it the exact same way.
1:17:23
Just didn't call it the dream 100.
1:17:24
It's like, once you say, these are my people, I will own you.
1:17:28
You will be my customer.
1:17:30
Then you can just, you can zero all your focus on understanding their pain, their needs, their wants, their fears, their desires, what's going on in their lives.
1:17:40
Do they have kids?
1:17:41
Do they go to church?
1:17:42
Where do they eat dinner?
1:17:44
What kind of cars do they drive?
1:17:45
Like you know them.
1:17:46
And when you know them, then you can market to them.
1:17:50
And when you know that these are my hundred people I want, you can just, you can spend way more money where normally you might be, I can spend more.
1:17:58
on average, $4 a year per lead or what per target lead or whatever.
1:18:04
That's not the right word, but what is the word for that?
1:18:08
I don't even know.
1:18:09
It's like if I'm willing to, I've got a $50,000 budget.
1:18:12
And if I'm willing to spend $2 per across those people, I can go after 25,000 people.
1:18:18
He would have said, you'd narrow that down.
1:18:20
And I want to spend $100, $1,000.
1:18:22
I want to spend $5,000 getting them.
1:18:26
It's that kind of a concept.
1:18:28
And so then you can go deeper with your marketing.
1:18:31
You can do more advanced tactics.
1:18:33
You can mail them FedEx packages.
1:18:34
You can, Ben Kinney used to talk about mailing a guy a baseball, you know, that he'd take home and give to his kid.
1:18:40
Like you, that's the concept of the Dream 100.
1:18:43
And that was very impactful for me.
1:18:46
Because it allowed me to think about, okay, I want these neighborhoods.
1:18:49
I still think this way today.
1:18:50
These are the groups of people I want.
1:18:52
I haven't always practiced it as good as I should have.
1:18:55
But it very much changed the way I thought about marketing back then.
1:18:58
That's always carried with me.
1:18:59
It's been probably one of the most important marketing concepts that I learned.
1:19:04
There was one specific marketing tactic that you used back in Service Alphabet days.
1:19:10
I think it was to get into Academy.
1:19:11
I'm forgetting, you'll probably remember.
1:19:14
At conference, SA4, we had to write out, I wanna say it was a goal for 2020, the next year.
1:19:21
Was that mailed you a letter?
1:19:23
You gave me a letter and I mailed it back to you?
1:19:24
Yeah, exactly, and you mailed it back.
1:19:26
That was great.
1:19:27
That was great.
1:19:28
That worked, actually.
1:19:29
I don't remember how well it worked, but it worked.
1:19:30
Was it to get people into Academy?
1:19:33
Uh-huh.
1:19:33
I think it was to get him into Academy.
1:19:35
Yeah.
1:19:35
Yeah.
1:19:35
Well, I forget.
1:19:37
I just forget what the call to action was.
1:19:39
I remember there was something.
1:19:40
I don't know if it was like, hey, did you hit these goals last year?
1:19:43
And if not, like, I forget what the messaging was.
1:19:46
It was a reminder that you won't hit.
1:19:50
Just rub it into the face.
1:19:52
Well, no, if I remember, the strategy was you come to an event.
1:19:57
You're excited.
1:19:57
It's my...
1:19:59
maybe it was when we were talking the other day.
1:20:00
Maybe it wasn't on video.
1:20:01
We did this.
1:20:02
I think it was when we met up the other day.
1:20:03
I was talking about my favorite analogy is two guys sitting outside when, because we were sitting outside and the weather was really nice.
1:20:09
Weather's great.
1:20:09
They're both drinking beers.
1:20:11
They're talking the biggest game in the world.
1:20:12
I'm going to do this.
1:20:13
Next year's going to be this.
1:20:14
I'm doubling my, they're all talking a big game.
1:20:16
You come to a conference, you're all excited, you're talking to your buddies, you're motivated, you have big goals, you write down all your big goals.
1:20:23
99% chance you're not gonna hit any of your goals.
1:20:24
So next year, I'm gonna mail you something to remind you, last year you said you didn't do any of it, you didn't do any of it, you didn't be in the academy.
1:20:32
That was my strategy.
1:20:33
So yeah.
1:20:33
Oh man, let's go, I love it.
1:20:35
Good stuff, anything to add?
1:20:37
Wrap it up?
1:20:37
No, I think I'm good, what about you?
1:20:39
No, I think that's great.
1:20:40
I have a bajillion other books, but I think those are good six heavy hitters.
1:20:45
Yeah, well, you need to go sell software.
1:20:47
So I'll let you or maybe rest and get ready to talk all day tomorrow.
1:20:51
Tomorrow, yeah.
1:20:51
Oh, man.
1:20:52
All right.
1:20:53
Thanks, brother.
1:20:53
Appreciate it.
1:20:54
See you, Mike.